The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis Is Really Telling Us

Marx’s economic theories decreed that capitalism would
collapse once the working classes came to realise the full
extent of their exploitation by their unscrupulous employers. When that came to pass, they would then rise up against the
political system that supported the capitalists’ interests and overthrow their oppressors, instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat
where they owned the means of production and banished exploitation once and for all. Although communism did succeed in taking
over the political system, and means of production, in large parts
of the world over the course of the first half of the twentieth century
(Russia, China and Eastern Europe, for example), capitalism itself
never did collapse as Marx had forecast, despite a series of severe
socio- political and economic crises in the form of wars and recessions.
The Great Depression, for example, really ought to have ignited a
rebellion, having revealed the glaring contradictions underlying the
system. Marxist theorists have speculated at length as to why capitalism has nevertheless managed to hang on, and have come up with
some ingenious solutions, such as the concept of hegemony. The
details of the concept will be discussed below, but it enabled theorists
to argue that the revolution Marx had prophesied had merely been
delayed for a while, assuring supporters there was nothing wrong
with Marx’s actual projections or the theories that had generated
them: the dictatorship of the proletariat was still on its way.

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